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Windows 8 Banned by HWBot (Updated with fix!)

By James Lu - on 26 Aug 2013, 11:00am

Windows 8 Banned by HWBot

Updated 26th August 2013: Ocaholic has conducted an investigation on the Windows 8 RTC problem and posted a conclusion of their results as well as a fix. At first it appeared that only Intel CPUs were affected, and that the problem could be fixed by installing Windows 8 on an AMD platform and then switching to an Intel CPU, however, Ocaholic also manged to reproduce the problem with an AMD system.

It seems that the problem is entirely due to Windows 8's RTC using its QPC Timer (Query Performance Counter), which itself is failing to use a reliable hardware time due to a missing or faulty parameter. 

Until Microsoft releases a patch to fix the problem it can be solved by running cmd as admin and entering: bcdedit /set {current} useplatformclock Yes

Source: Ocaholic

Originally posted on 20th August 2013:

HWBot, one of the world's most popular benchmarking and overclocking databases has banned any results from a machine running Windows 8 OS. This is due to a fault in Windows 8′s real-time clock (RTC), which all benchmarking tools use to let them know when a particular benchmark has started and finished.

Unfortunately, HWBot has discovered that Windows 8′s RTC isn’t reliable. HWBot doesn’t give specific details but essentially it has discovered that, changing your CPU base clock frequency in software can have a massive impact on Windows 8′s ability to keep accurate time. For example, underclocking a Haswell system from 130MHz to 122MHz (-6%), results in Windows 8 losing a massive 18 seconds over a five minute period (see video).

Obviously this is a problem for benchmarks. Imagine running a five minute benchmark on an underclocked system and having it actually run for five minutes and eighteen seconds.

As such, HWBot says that it’s “impossible to verify the veracity of a system performance” under Windows 8, and thus benchmarks performed under Windows 8 will no longer be accepted. All previous Windows 8-based records will also be disqualified.

Source: HWBot

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